1984/06/01 by Bruce G. Trigger · 14 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Archaeological Research and Protection #Archaeology and ancient environmental studies #Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation #Scholarship #History #Joke #Archaeology #Sociology #Literature #Art #Law #Political science
paper · doi:10.1080/03122417.1984.12092927
published in Australian Archaeology 18(1), 1-16 (Taylor & Francis)
openalex publication_date 1984/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/03
Gordon Childe was known to his contemporaries as a brilliant prehistorian who held radical left-wing views. While his voicing of Marxist sentiments, together with other unconventional behaviour resulted in some ostracism, especially in Scotland (Graham 1981:213, 223) and may have adversely affected his career at certain points, British archaeologists generally responded by refusing to take this behaviour seriously. Sir Mortimer Wheeler (1957) maintained that Marxism coloured rather than shaped Childe's interpretations of archaeological data, while Glyn Daniel (1958:66-7) saw him as venturing into Marxism for answers to archaeological problems but soon tiring of it. Most archaeologists treated his Marxism as a cultivated eccentricity or a 'convoluted intellecutal joke' that was invented to shock them and responded by refusing to be shocked (Piggott 1958). Only Graham Clark (1976) has accepted it as exerting a serious and lasting influence on Childe's scholarship. In the first  Childe Memorial Lecture he described it as propelling Childe into archaeology, blighting the scholarship of his middle years, and finally being rejected by him at the end of his career ( for refutations of these arguments, see Spriggs [l977] and Thomas [1982] ) .